America's First Daughter: A Novel (61 page)
Read America's First Daughter: A Novel Online
Authors: Stephanie Dray,Laura Kamoie
O
UR DEEPEST APPRECIATION
goes to the skilled and devoted staff at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. Tour guides at Monticello were patient with our sometimes outlandish questions, and Tom Nash gave us Patsy’s quip about her father and his peas. Monticello historian Christa Dierksheide was particularly generous with her time, expertise, and insights, and not least of all included the suggestion that Ann Bankhead may have “married what she knew.”
We’d have been lost without the amazing resources at Monti cello.org and the cache of digitized letters the National Archives makes available at founders.archives.gov.
We’d also like to thank our families for their cheerleading and support. Our thanks, too, to Megan Brett for helping us to research things like judicial wigs, and for retrieving photographs of original letters for us from the University of Virginia. Additionally, we’d like to thank Jean Slattery for buying Stephanie that first Jefferson book all those years ago and inspiring an obsession; our editor, Amanda Bergeron, for being as excited about this story as we were; our agent, Kevan Lyon, for being our lioness on this project; Leslie Carrol for details about prerevolutionary France; and Kate Quinn for critiquing the manuscript.
Our bibliography is too extensive to list here, but we wanted to acknowledge especially our reliance on the letters of Jefferson, his family, friends, colleagues, contemporaries, and biographers in providing period-appropriate language, descriptions, and viewpoints. Additionally, we must cite the authoritative
Martha Jefferson Randolph, Daughter of Monticello
and
Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson
’s America
by Cynthia Kierner, from whom we adopted many theories and characterizations; also,
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
by Annette Gordon-Reed, by which we were heavily influenced;
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait
by Fawn Brodie, whose groundbreaking work helped inspire this book;
Flight from Monticello: Jefferson at War
by Michael Kranish;
Sally Hemings,
the beautiful novel written by Barbara Chase-Riboud, whose iconic portrayal of Sally inspired our own;
Jefferson’s Adoptive Son
by George Green Shackelford;
The Diary and Letters of Gouverneur Morris
and
The French Revolution of 1789 as viewed in light of republican institutions
by John Stevens Cabot Abbott, whose descriptions of France and the chronology of the revolution we adopted;
The Plantation Mistress
by Catherine Clinton, whose exploration of the complaints of women on plantations our heroine echoes;
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
by Henry Wiencek whose controversial book gave us a much needed counterweight to our heroine’s too-cheery assessment of her father;
Twilight at Monticello
by Alan Pell Crawford; the memoirs of Casanova, for inspiring period-appropriate romantic gestures;
The Paris Years of Thomas Jefferson
by William Howard Adams;
The Women Jefferson Loved
by Virginia Scharff; and
Parlor Politics
by Catherine Allgor. More sources and resources can be found at AmericasFirstDaughter.com.
Meet Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
The Paris Letters—New Details About the Life of Our “Cher Jeffy”
Walking in Patsy Jefferson’s Footsteps: A Conversation with the Authors
Meet Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie
STEPHANIE DRAY
is an award-winning, bestselling, and two time RITA Award–nominated author of historical women’s fiction. Her critically acclaimed series about Cleopatra’s daughter has been translated into eight different languages and won NJRW’s Golden Leaf. As Stephanie Draven, she is a national bestselling author of genre fiction and American-set historical women’s fiction. She is a frequent panelist and presenter at national writing conventions and lives near the nation’s capital. Before she became a novelist, Stephanie was a lawyer, a game designer, and a teacher. Now she uses the stories of women in history to inspire the young women of today.
LAURA KAMOIE
has always been fascinated by the people, stories, and physical presence of the past, which led her to a lifetime of historical and archaeological study and training. She holds a doctoral degree in early American history from the College of William and Mary, has published two nonfiction books on early America, and most recently held the position of Associate Professor of History at the U.S. Naval Academy before transitioning to a full-time career writing genre fiction as Laura Kaye, the
New York Times
bestselling author of more than twenty books. Her debut historical novel,
America’s First Daughter,
coauthored with Stephanie Dray, allowed her the exciting opportunity to combine her love of history with her passion for storytelling. Laura lives amid the colonial charm of Annapolis, Maryland, with her husband and two daughters.
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The Paris Letters
New Details About the Life of Our “Cher Jeffy”
A
MERICA’S
F
IRST
D
AUGHTER
was many years in the making. From the dinner at a writers’ conference where we conceived of the idea to the crazy night we stayed up past 3
A.M.
outlining the plot, to the many months of research and writing, it was always a labor of love. One that we were proud to finish in July 2015, when we handed in the corrected galleys for this novel and toasted our accomplishment.
As multi-published authors, we both know the sense of relief and pride that comes with finishing a book, but also the sadness at leaving beloved characters and their world behind. In this case, though, we felt confident that we’d uncovered everything that we could about Martha “Patsy” Randolph Jefferson.
So imagine our surprise when, on August 12, 2015, we saw an announcement from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation that a family of descendants had made publicly available a cache of new and previously unknown letters, most of which were addressed to the heroine of this novel during the years in which she lived in Paris.
Our excitement at learning there were, indeed, new things to discover about our heroine was matched only by our anxiety that we might not get the chance to include them in this novel. We knew that we wouldn’t have the opportunity to write in entirely new storylines—which Patsy’s previously unknown relationship with the Duke of Dorset might have justified because of what it reveals both about our heroine’s life choices and the political ramifications of the attention she received, not to mention her father’s state of mind. But we hoped that by adding many new details into the existing story—such as our heroine’s popularity with the men in Paris, the anonymous love notes she received, her closeness with her convent friends, and the artificial flowers she made to give as gifts—our book would offer the most current study of Martha Jefferson Randolph, including information not revealed in any of her biographies to date.
A particular favorite among the new letters was this one, from Maria Ball to Patsy, dated June 23, 1789: “I make you my compliments Dear Jefferson, as you took the prize. I heard of your party at the Palais Royale with the Duke of Dorset and his two nieces. A gentleman told me he had seen you and that you remained there till it was quite duskish and that the duke seemed to care very much about you, which I am not surprised, my dear Jef. His choice can only honor him and make many, many people jealous.”
*
Letters like this bring Patsy’s younger years to life in a way that rarely happens in the eighteenth century, and absolutely enchanted us, especially when we learned that on August 7, 1789, the duke sent Patsy a “simple ring” as a token of his affection after she’d refused to accept a diamond ring—and, possibly, a proposal—he’d given her. In the eighteenth century, a diamond ring need not have signified an intent of marriage, but the context of Patsy’s refusal led us to think that she could’ve been a duchess!
Thankfully, the team at William Morrow was as excited about this development as we were and made special allowances for us to dig through the treasure trove of new letters to bring the heroine of this book even more fully alive. We hope you enjoy reading these details as much as we enjoyed discovering them.
—SD & LK
A Conversation with the Authors
B
EFORE UNDERTAKING
this project, the authors separately visited Monticello and other historical sites in Virginia and France. However, in writing together, they thought a joint field trip to some of the Virginia settings in
America’s First Daughter
was called for. And, oh, the adventure they had.
Laura:
There were a couple of reasons I wanted to take this joint field trip to Virginia. First, since I was a girl walking the Antietam Battlefield, I’ve always felt that past events and people leave a mark on places. To me, a site’s past often feels tangibly present. So I wanted to see what Monticello and Tuckahoe
felt
like. As a historian, I’ve always believed there is a lot to be gained from walking in a historical person’s footsteps—learning what you can see from her room or how long it will take to walk between places or how sound travels through a house all give you a deeper understanding that you can’t always get from documents, especially for a novel where you want the evocative details. Even more than writing nonfiction, writing fiction requires you to get inside the head and heart of a historical figure, and putting yourself in their physical spaces helps with that in so many unexpected ways. Field trips were always a big part of my teaching, and they certainly inform how I learn about the past, too.
Steph:
I agree that if people leave some essence of themselves behind in this world, the work of a historical novelist is to channel it. Trying to understand the good and bad decisions of an important historical figure is an effort to make sense of the present world they bequeathed to us. But trying to get inside that historical figure’s
head and heart
is a way of touching the past. Both are exercises in empathy that gave us goosebumps. Especially when walking the same paths that our characters walked. There were many times that our theories were borne out by evidence we found on this field trip. It was important to do it
together
and not just because we enjoy each other’s company so much. We’d both been to some of these places before, but the
aha
moments we experienced because we had two sets of eyes on it were amazing.
Laura:
Absolutely. One of the most memorable
aha
moments occurred when we were standing outside the black fence around the Jefferson family graveyard at Monticello. Next to Jefferson’s tall obelisk monument, I noticed a plaque detailing who was buried in the cemetery and where. And the plat of the burials showed something so surprising that we had a total writerly freak-out as we absorbed all its implications—Patsy isn’t buried next to her husband. Instead, Jefferson is buried
between
Patsy and Tom Randolph, and Patsy lays next to her father. If that isn’t emblematic of so much about the relationships of these three people, we don’t know what is. That moment wouldn’t have meant as much if we hadn’t been there together.
Steph:
Yes, but of course,
because
we were there together, I’m afraid we made a bit of a menace of ourselves at Monticello! While all the other people in our group tour stood gazing admiringly at far more famous relics, we nearly tripped over each other to get a closer look at William Short’s green and gold embossed grooming kit, which included, to our delight, a chocolate pot. (No one else seemed to find it nearly as amusing that Short’s belongings are on display in the Madison Room, given the animosity between the two men.) Then, after asking a litany of strange questions, we tried to reconstruct the violent altercation between Thomas Mann Randolph and Charles Bankhead in the dining room. I’m fairly certain they put a security guard on us after that incident . . . at least until we explained what we were about!